Black Feathers Read Online Free

food, loudly enough that Skylark smiled. “A little.”
    Skylark stood up and hefted her knapsack. “Come on,” she said. “We’re probably still in time for dinner.”
    Cassie rose slowly, keeping her grip tight on the strap of her backpack.
    As they walked out of the park, a single crow watched them from a telephone wire. It followed them down the path with its eyes, hopped in the air and turned around as they passed underit, then watched as they walked onto the sidewalk, waiting until they had disappeared from view before it took flight.

    Constable Chris Harrison was tempted to put his winter coat back on. He had been inside for more than an hour, but he was still no closer to being warm.
    He resisted the urge, though, and left his coat hanging on the hook on the outside edge of the cubicle he was using. He knew the cold would pass.
    Harrison had grown up in Victoria: he knew the way winters went. Three or four months of rain, broken occasionally by days so steel grey they hurt the eyes, and only a few days when the thermometer dipped into the negative. The cold never lasted more than a week or so. Maybe, in a rare year, the city would get more than a few scattered flakes of snow, but it would be wiped out by rain almost before it got a chance to settle. The blizzard the previous year had been a once-a-century anomaly.
    That was winter in Victoria. That was why people stayed, despite the way the cost of everything kept going up. That was why people came from across the country.
    All sorts of people.
    Glancing over his shoulder, Harrison took his notepad out of his breast pocket and flipped it open. The name was scrawled on the top of the third page back, behind the scratched details of a domestic disturbance, a public intoxication and a car theft complaint.
    Cassie Weathers.
    He typed the name into the green search box on the computer screen and waited a few seconds. Nothing.
    He tried
Weathers, Cassy,
looking over his shoulder again as he waited.
    Nothing.
    Weathers, Cassandra
brought up a missing persons report.
    The paperwork had been filed by the Pressfield detachment of the RCMP on November 15—nearly a month before. Mary Weathers, the girl’s mother, had reported her daughter missing from the hospital, where she had been under observation following a house fire. The mother had returned to the hospital the afternoon after the fire to find Cassandra gone.
    There was a short description and a school photo.
    “Whatcha got there?”
    Jane Farrow was almost leaning over his shoulder, looking at his screen.
    “That girl from this morning.”
    “The one we ousted from the doorway of the bookstore?”
    Harrison nodded. “She’s a runaway.”
    His partner snorted. “No shit. What did you think she was, a reporter?” He could even hear her smirk.
    “No, but I thought we should get some details. The report’s about a month old, out of Pressfield.”
    “Where the fuck is that?”
    Harrison shook his head. “In the Interior somewhere?”
    Jane straightened and put her hand on the top edge of the cubicle. “We’ll pick her up the next time we see her,” she said matter-of-factly.
    “Not much point,” Harrison muttered, reading through the description. “She turned sixteen in October.”
    Sixteen was right on the line. Legally, a sixteen-year-old wasn’t a runaway. Although still minors, they were considered old enough to live on their own, to make their own decisions.Usually renting an apartment or setting up a hydro account required parental consent at that age, but there was nothing wrong—legally—with a sixteen-year-old living independently.
    They could pick her up, try to convince her to go home to her family, but there was nothing they could do to force her, no legal grounds to hold her or send her back.
    “Well, good luck to her,” Farrow said, somewhere between genuine and bitter.
    “Yeah.” Still distracted by the computer screen: sixteen years old, a younger sister at home.
    It was hard to